Well, so what? Even a small number of people can really hurt the country, right? So, here’s a study about whether undocumented people increase rates of violent crime:

“[W]e combine newly developed estimates of the unauthorized population with multiple data sources to capture the criminal, socioeconomic, and demographic context of all 50 states and Washington, DC, from 1990 to 2014 to provide the first longitudinal analysis of the macro‐level relationship between undocumented immigration and violence. The results from fixed‐effects regression models reveal that undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative….”

For anyone who does not yet have a Christmas tree, I have made a chart to help you decide what kind of tree to get. In four cases, I ranked the top two choices. Here‘s a link I found while creating this chart which shows where to recycle trees in Arizona.

I’ve largely stopped jogging outdoors in recent years. One reason is that I’ve been concerned for a long time about the air quality. It kind of defeats the purpose of exercising if you’re breathing in car exhaust and coal fumes.*

Arizona’s most recent air quality grade from the American Lung Association is, overwhelmingly, an F, mainly thanks to our cars and reliance on coal for electricity.*

We know from a 2013 MIT study that air pollution causes roughly 200,000 premature deaths in the US annually.* This isn’t surprising as we also know that air pollution increases risk of respiratory diseases, lung cancer, and heart disease.

What shocked me years ago as a psychology student was coming across various studies indicating different ways in which air pollution causes cognitive problems. It reduces brain mass, negatively impacts memory, and it’s associated with increased Alzheimer’s incidence.**

Reading this stuff, I would think back to times throughout my teens when I would ride my bicycle a hundred miles a week from Silly Mountain out to Crismon and back, praying that I wouldn’t get stuck at a red light next to that poorly-serviced 1970s station wagon. Or summers when I worked for my mom’s husband in road construction shoveling dirt from curbs while walking around in a black cloud of exhaust from the giant Caterpillar machines. I look back and wonder what permanent cognitive damage I unknowingly inflicted on myself.

Silly Mountain, A Stone’s Throw from My Teenage Home

These days, people are often surprised that I drive around in a Micro Machine. Seems to me that that’s the least I can do. Just like I think voting for people who oppose fossil fuels and support cleaner energy sources is the least I can do.

I think it’s this easy: Kids should be able to ride their bicycles and play outside without an increased risk of physical or cognitive impairment. It’s inexcusable and unconscionable that they don’t have such a guarantee in Arizona in 2018.

The first person I talk to comes out guns blazing. I don’t even knock on his door. He just pops out with a “Hey there!”

“Hey, I’m Clif. I’m with the Democrats. I’m collecting signatures for some local candidates.”

“I used to be a Democrat,” he says, “back when they were conservative. Now they’re for the homosexuals and abortion, and they’re against God.”

I say, “Well, you know, I’m not a big fan of abortion, but I think the Democrats have it right. Number one, strangely enough, making more restrictive abortion laws doesn’t actually reduce the rate of abortion.* It’s like Barry Goldwater said: ‘It’s always been around, and it always will be.’* Things we know that help reduce the rate of abortion, though, like increased access to birth control and sex ed are things Democrats are generally for.”*

“Well, that’s true,” he says, “and that’s why I’m not strictly for one side or the other. But, I don’t know why everything has to be gay, gay, gay now. You can’t turn on the TV these days without homosexuals in everything. You know, I believe in the Bible, and the Bible makes it totally clear that homosexuality is wrong. Take Sodom and Gomorrah: God sends angels down to Lot, and the wicked men of the city try to have sex with them. Lot offers them his daughters — now that part’s terrible — but the men want the angels.”

I say, “Yeah, but I would point out that there are different ways to interpret these things. There are people out there who believe — I’m sure — just as strongly in God and the Bible who don’t think homosexuality is bad. In that verse you mentioned, for instance, they might say that God’s problem with the wicked men was not that they were homosexuals but that they wanted to rape strangers. Maybe God is just against people who want to rape other people.”*

He says, “Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who want to distort the truth. They try to call people like me an extremist just because I’ve been married to my wife for 52 years.”

I say, “Well, I wouldn’t call you that. I would just say that I have gay friends myself who I care for a lot. They’re people who I think suffered because they grew up around people who told them that they were bad. They couldn’t change this ‘bad’ thing about themselves, so it made them deeply unhappy. I think that’s terrible.”

He then tells me a bizarre story about a handsome nephew who he says was turned gay by his mom and sisters who would dress him up like a girl, in dresses and makeup. I let that one go. I liked that the guy called his nephew “a real head-turner,” though.

This was like a 20-minute conversation that I won’t recount all of here. It turns out that the guy doesn’t like Jeff Flake because Flake’s nephew apparently … neglected some dogs? The guy doesn’t like McCain because McCain is responsible for the shoddy condition of the VA apparently.

He talks about how you can’t have the Bible in schools anymore, but you can have the “yin yang.” I kinda regret not finding out what the “yin yang” is ….

Trump, though. There’s somethin’ about that Trump guy. He says, “Trump’s a guy who can’t be bought ’cause he’s already a billionaire.”

As I almost always do when I hear Trump’s name, I begin to vomit uncontrollably. No, I’m kidding. I just vomit in my mind. The mind vomit helps to cloud the mental image of Trump.

This ex-Democrat then says, “And the Mueller investigation — the Democrats are just dragging it out. It’s just a waste of taxpayer money.”

I start to say, “Well, the Republicans spent a lot of taxpayer money to investigate Hillary….”

On April 14th, 2017, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey signed House Bill 2244 into law. The bill primarily calls for the following: “Constitutional and statutory requirements for statewide initiative measures must be strictly construed and persons using the initiative process must strictly comply with those constitutional and statutory requirements.”*

The bill as introduced by House Representative Eddie Farnsworth (R-12) pertained to concealed weapons permits and “electronic reports.” That bill’s text was stricken in the Senate Appropriations Committee, where all six Republicans voted in favor and all four Democrats voted against the measure to replace the bill’s language and intent.*

View Senate Appropriations Committee Votes

The bill passed the Senate with all Democrats opposing and all but one Republican voting in favor:*

Breakdown of Senate votes on HB 2244

Party Affiliation

Yes

No

Abstain

Total

Democrat

0

13

0

13

Republican

16

1

0

17

Total

16

14

0

30

View Senate Votes

In the House, the bill also passed exclusively with Republican votes:*

Breakdown of House votes on HB 2244

Party Affiliation

Yes

No

NV/E

Total

Democrat

0

23

2

26

Republican

34

0

1

34

Total

34

23

3

60

View House Votes

Legislators in favor of the bill note, in the text of the bill, that initiatives give “extraordinary power” to voters. They write that courts have required strict compliance when a legislative tool is considered an extraordinary power. In order to amend any voter-approved initiative, Arizona’s Voter Protection Act requires three-fourths of the state House and Senate to vote for the amendment. This stipulation inhibits the legislature from changing or correcting voter-approved measures. Thus, according to the authors of the bill, the initiative has become an extraordinary power, requiring that it be held to a standard of strict compliance to constitutional and statutory requirements.*

The measure could result in individual signatures or entire pages of signatures on petitions being thrown out due to minor instances of noncompliance. If a page has more than the maximum of 15 signatures, it could be thrown out. If an address is deemed to be illegible, the signature could be thrown out. If a petition sheet does not conform to size requirements, the entire page could be thrown out. A signature might also be stricken if the signer uses a shortened version of a name such as “Jim” for “James.”* Such rules were in place prior to the passage of this bill where 20 different discrepancies could result in a page of signatures or individual signatures from being counted. However, before HB2244, only “substantial compliance” was deemed necessary, allowing officials leeway in determining whether a minor example of noncompliance was serious enough to warrant rejection.*

Other Battles in the War

In addition to the strict compliance bill, Republicans authored House Bill 2023, signed into law by Governor Ducey on March 9th, 2016, which makes it a felony to collect and turn in ballots unless one is an election official, family member of the signer, or a mail carrier. Although presented as a way to protect the integrity of elections, no Republican has furnished evidence of a single instance in which someone has tampered with ballots. On the other hand, this law makes it impossible for organizations behind various initiatives to pay groups to collect ballots once initiatives have received a sufficient number of signatures to get them on the ballot.*

On March 23rd of this year, Governor Ducey signed House Bill 2404 into law, which outlaws pay-per-signature gathering of signatures on citizen initiatives. The bill also requires that signature collectors be paid minimum wage and raises the total days election officials have to verify signatures. Critics charge that, because of the law, signature collectors will have less incentive to collect as many signatures as possible. Legislator Doug Coleman, who voted in favor of the bill, responded that petition gatherers can simply use volunteers. However, an analysis of initiatives that went to ballot over four election cycles found that none made it using only volunteers.* As with HB2244 and HB2023, HB2404 was authored by and voted for exclusively by Republicans. As with HB2023, sponsors and passers cited concerns of protecting voters from fraud, though they again furnished no evidence that such fraud had occurred.* In fact, available evidence suggests that how signature-gatherers are paid has no relationship to prevalence of fraud.*

Detractors of the concept of initiatives argue that the “public legislature” allowed for by the initiative process contrasts with the Framers’ view of an elected republic that would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.”* Those more in favor of direct democracy might cite Jefferson who wrote that “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories.”*

Arizona, like 24 other states, allows voters to propose initiatives, a law established in the state constitution at the state’s founding. Initiatives are laws or constitutional amendments proposed and voted on by voters which allow those voters to change the state government beyond and, in some cases, in opposition to what state legislators do. To get an initiative on an official ballot, a number of voters equal to 10% of the total number of voters who voted in the most recent gubernatorial election must sign a petition in favor of a particular proposal. Initiatives must be filed by the secretary of state no fewer than 4 months prior to the date of the election. Between 1970 and 2013, various entities attempted 425 petitions. Of those, 16% made it to the ballot. Of those, under half were approved by Arizona voters. This means, ultimately, that only 8% of petitions attempted became law over that period.*

Ballot initiatives have been controversial from the start. The first attempt to curtail initiatives came in 1916 after initiatives had passed granting women’s suffrage and instituting alcohol prohibition. This early attempt failed. The Voter Protection Act mentioned in the text of HB2244 was the result of a failed 1996 initiative to legalize marijuana. The initiative passed, but lawmakers gutted it the following year. In response, a 1998 initiative created the Voter Protection Act which requires 3/4 vote by state legislators in both chambers to repeal an initiative-created law and then only to “further the purpose” of the law. A criticism of the Voter Protection Act is that it caused a downgrade in the state’s credit rating. However, the state’s treasurer shows a current rating of “Very strong” from Standard & Poor’s, which is just below its best rating and very close to its rating over the past 10 years.*

The Future of Initiatives

Between 1970 and 2013, 67 of 425 initiatives made it to the ballot, less than half of those 67 becoming law. Because it currently takes more than 200,000 signatures to get an initiative onto the ballot,* it is already extremely difficult for citizens who do not feel adequately represented to defy the plans of the state’s dominant political faction.

In order to give a stronger voice to voters via the initiative process, electronic initiatives could be employed. An electronic voting system has already been successfully employed in the state since 2012 that allows state candidates to gather half of the signatures required for their nominations. A similar system could be employed for initiatives.* For now, though, unilateral efforts by members of a single party in the state, ostensibly created to protect the integrity of the initiative process and ballot-gathering, are instead more likely to reduce the ability of citizens who feel unrepresented to have a voice.

The Maricopa County Commission on Trial Court Appointments recommends candidates for the position of trial court judge in the Maricopa County Superior Courts.

When there is a vacancy on the Maricopa County Superior Court, the commission announces that it is accepting applications to fill that vacancy. After interviews are conducted, the commission makes its decision about who to recommend to the Governor of Arizona. The commission is required to submit a list with at least three names on it for each vacancy. It is required to take into account “ethnic, gender and geographic diversity.”

If a judge is voted off the court, the judge will be replaced by the sitting governor.